<\/p>\n
In the summer, Natasha gets lazy. She’s a lazy girl naturally, but only
\nbecause she’s been gifted with a wealthy family (which I’m not supposed
\nto mention) and a high metabolism (which I can mention, because it
\nmeans she’s reached an unmentionable age and still maintains a “girlish
\nbody”). On especially comfortable days, when DC approaches 90 degrees
\nand things look rough, you can find Natasha in my backyard, beneath
\ntrees planted by suburban developers 60 years ago, on one of my good
\nblankets, loaded to the gills with vodka and muscle relaxants.<\/p>\n
Natasha makes me think of dreams. She’s the type of girl who
\nhaunted me on lonely nights, and filled my head whenever past
\ngirlfriends were away. She’s loyal as a dog, vicious as a wildcat and
\ndangerous as a burlap sack full of oversized hornets that have just
\nbeen tossed down 32 stairs to land in your bedroom at 4am in the
\nmorning.<\/p>\n
She’s a pretty little thing full of indignation, love, and a feverish
\nneed to break loose of self-sustained boundaries. The eternal struggles
\nplaying out in tiny features and small, hard fists.<\/p>\n
I met Natasha some time ago. I think, in many ways, she’s always been
\nwith me. In high school, she was the gust of wind, the “spirit,” that
\ncaught up with me whenever I stopped running. But it was in my adult
\nyears that I met her, the real her, in a physical sense. A constant
\ncompanion, the woman whispering in my ear, the scent of perfume on the
\nnighttime air, the warm creature next to me in a bed.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing quite like a woman up close. The curves and the flesh,
\nthe light covering of hair, every ugly flaw a mystery of beauty. Women
\nrepresent everything that is powerful and weak in humanity. They are
\nthe confused, boiling creatures of emotion. Dangerous, unpredictable,
\nchildish, insane, rock and rolling tits, hips, lips and pussy.<\/p>\n
They say putting a woman in charge of government will change things,
\nbut the last ordeal we need is to live through a government of
\nemotions. Cat calls and inexplicable judgments, angry first impressions
\nand over protectiveness, mothering in the Oval Office and wildcat
\nbattles on the Senate floor.<\/p>\n
With men in charge, you know where the axe came from. Mindless,
\nbludgeoning. War, hatred, prejudice, camaraderie, cliques, sects,
\nclubs, secrets, blustering madness. Women, like cats, move silently and
\npounce. Sometimes you don’t notice them and, when you do, it’s because
\nthey want to be noticed and they won’t stop crying at the moon till you
\ncoddle them. Men are the same, but there was never a moment you failed
\nto notice them. They are crying and mewling from the moment you burst
\nthrough the doors.<\/p>\n
I never trusted women. With me, it’s been a story of betrayal and pain
\nfrom day one. I’ve been two-timed, cheated on, stalked, cut, and stolen
\nfrom once too many times to have an open heart. But Natasha doesn’t
\nmind. She never seemed to care. Her agenda doesn’t involve me in any
\nintimate way. She lives for herself and my presence, whether it be for
\ncomfort or because our stars just happened to be a few light years
\ncloser than others, I’ll never know. She could leave any day or never
\nleave. Of this, there was no sense of prediction, so we took what we
\nhad. She, the voice of my writing. Me, mild amusement for long summer
\nafternoons.<\/p>\n
I sat down beside her on my good blanket and looked at her pale, nude
\nbody. She was sunbathing in shadows, though she would still burn
\neasily. She wasn’t in the yard for the sun, anyway, she was here to
\nshake off the cloak of greys and blacks from the long and strange
\nwinter of 2004. The troubled January, the dark February, the deceptive
\nMarch and early April. She was here to, finally, soak up warmth and
\ngreen and blue and brown whilst the locust infestation drifted lazily
\naround her.<\/p>\n
Wherever I was in the world, Natasha was always with me in spirit, and
\nwe always came to visit this back yard. It was a place of invocations.
\nThe beginning and end of each story, the ebb and the flow of every
\nconversation. This place where I danced and sang as a child with my
\nmother, even then a woman of shadows and darkness. The place where my
\ngrandfather set off fireworks and where I played with three generations
\nof Best in Show Newfoundland dogs.<\/p>\n
It was a back yard of life and death, realities and dreams. Every
\nchildhood home is like this. The trees and the house stays on, but dogs
\nand mothers die. Father’s leave. Men and women betray and sin and cry
\nand love. The yard full of bones.<\/p>\n
I press my hand to Natasha’s soft belly and I have to picture her eyes
\nfluttering open beneath the dark glasses. Perhaps they were open all
\nthe time. She turns to me and smiles, black lipstick, pale skin, coffee
\nand cigarette teeth. She doesn’t speak, but she still tells me to kiss
\nher in that seemingly bacterial method of communication that a man and
\na woman share between them when they know each other well. I kiss and,
\nthrough that portal, the current year comes boiling into my mind.<\/p>\n
A TV is on in the house, Wild West Mexican music playing in a
\nTechnicolor cantina. A calico cat rests on my lap. I look up into the
\nlight of a full moon, battling the flickering television, and the
\ncalico chirps at me, resettles herself and turns her head upside down.
\nI’m restless, I want to move and write, I want to run and fight. But,
\ninstead, I settle deeper into the chair, my attention caught somewhere
\nbetween moon and TV, and absently stroke the drooling calico’s chin.
\nShe seems to smile, eyes pressed closed, tail at rest. The Stoli is out
\nof reach, but I’m still drifting.<\/p>\n
Then I move forward to writing. Pounding through a hundred pages, three
\nhundred, a thousand. A trilogy, a single book, a monster to sell, hopes
\nrunning higher than the limit of Pickett’s doomed charge.<\/p>\n
A decade of work and success and failure. A decade of love and power. A
\ndecade of troubles and loss. Pain, death, despair, life, strength,
\nsuccess. The future, in a capsule, in a woman’s breath, in her taste,
\non her lips. I pull back and she places a hand on my face, careful to
\navoid the nerve damage on my right side. She can’t stand to see me
\nflinch anymore. She smiles. I have to kiss her again, a hand moving
\ndown her body, cupping her breast, spinning and rising to her nipple,
\ndown and drifting to her belly, the warmth between her thighs, slipping
\ninside her as the kiss becomes a gasp, the hand on my face now in my
\nhair, the other hand forcing my own deeper.<\/p>\n
And, now, there is no sense of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,367],"class_list":["post-2456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-natasha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2879,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456\/revisions\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}